Monday, June 5, 2017

I watched the
evening’s “feature,” a Lifetime “premiere” movie called The Perfect Soulmate whose credits immediately warned me I was likely to
be disappointed because both the producers (Pierre David and Tom Berry) and the
directors (Curtis James Crawford and Anthony LeFresne) were frequent
collaborators, including on previous “Perfect” projects, of Lifetime’s greatest
writer, Christine Conradt, but la Conradt herself was not involved this time. Instead the writer was someone
named John Serge, and that was doubly disappointing: not only was Conradt not
involved but a man was taking her place in scribing a tale about women’s
miseries and maltreatments both of men and each other. The “Perfect … ”
template as Conradt and others have been working it since Conradt sold her
first Lifetime script, The Perfect Nanny, in 2000, features an innocent heroine who thinks she’s found the
“perfect” husband/lover/co-worker/nanny/teacher/servant/in-law/whatever until
horrible things happen to her and those around her and finally she realizes
that “perfect” really means “psycho.” The Perfect Soulmate suffers from the lack of the kind of dimension Conradt has
brought to at least some of her villainesses; instead the title character, Lee
Maxson (Cassandra Scerbo, who like most Lifetime villainesses is of medium
height, dark-haired and affects a veneer of perkiness), is a pretty
straightforward bad girl whose backstory is that she murdered her abusive
father (we’re never told whether dad merely beat her or sexually molested her
as well), though the authorities ruled it suicide, and thought she’d be able to
get out of the generic small town (actually a big enough city to have at least
two book publishers headquartered there) where all this takes place to New York
City to pursue a career in publishing.

Instead she got trapped as the unwilling
caregiver of her diabetic mother Marlene (Deborah Grover) and ended up in a
sucky life in which she got to do nothing all day except work at a bookstore to
make ends meet and go home to take care of mom — who asks her why she doesn’t
have a boyfriend and Lee fires right back that it’s because caring for Marlene
leaves her no time or energy to date. Lee takes care of Marlene when she goes
into an attack and collapses on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator, and
instead of getting mom something to eat Lee — in a scene suggesting that either
she or John Serge has seen the 1941 film The Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis dispatched her invalid husband
by refusing to get him his heart medication — instead kicks her, walks out of
the house and leaves her to die. The “perfect soulmate” Lee thinks she’s found
is Sarah Miles (Alex Paxton-Beesley), unhappy wife of construction-company
owner Daniel Miles (Jeff Teravainen) — the more directors Crawford and LeFresne
show us of his unclad chest in his opening scene, the more we’re sure that like
virtually all attractive guys in Lifetime movies, he’s going to turn out to be
a no-good rotter, and indeed he does. He spends virtually all his evenings away
from home on so-called “business meetings” which are, of course, actually
trysts with other women — the cops later pick up one of his paramours and she
says, “It was my first time,” to which the laconic woman cop who’s going to
solve the whole thing replies, “It certainly wasn’t his” — and when she
threatens to divorce him, he announces that he’ll cut her off from his entire
fortune and leave her penniless (which she doesn’t mind, or at least says she doesn’t) and that he’ll demand and get sole custody of their
daughter Megan (Habree Abrys Larratt). That she decidedly does mind, and so she remains stuck in the marriage until
she finally gets up the courage to see a divorce lawyer, a woman who says
she’ll hire private investigators to tail Daniel and catch him cheating, which
hopefully will give her the evidence she needs to break up her pre-nuptial
agreement and get her a decent settlement and at least shared custody of Megan.

Only Daniel, who as a building contractor is used to working with “shady”
people, makes the P.I.’s tailing him on the first night and tells Sarah that
she’s got two choices — either abandon the divorce, or pursue it but at the
cost of never seeing her daughter again. Then Daniel leaves for one of his
evening trysts — and who should be waiting for him but Lee, who has “met” Sarah
online through her poetry blog. It seems that when Sarah met Daniel she was an
aspiring poet who had already brought out one book of verse with a local
independent publisher, Will Lawrence (Scott Gibson) and convinced a number of
people in the literary world that she was the next Sylvia Plath, even though
what we hear of her poetry makes it sound like her true métier would be writing for greeting-card companies. She’s
continued to publish poetry on a blog which Lee has stumbled across and decided
on the basis of her poems that Sarah is the one woman who will understand her,
love her and be her “perfect soulmate.” So she starts stalking Sylvia at her
home, sees Daniel slap her during their argument over her seeing a divorce
lawyer, and as Daniel goes out for his next tryst Lee sticks him up, shoots him
with the same gun with which she killed her dad years before (Crawford and
LeFresne give us a lot of close-ups of her giving loving attention to the gun
so we realize it is the same
weapon), and leaves him for dead. She also takes his wallet to make it look
like a robbery, but does not
steal his car even though she found a key for it (as well as one for his house,
which will be an important plot point later) — which mystifies the woman
detective put in charge of the case, Chris Collins (Gwenm Carsley —where did
casting directors Aaron Griffith, Lisa Parasyn and Ilona Smyth dig up all these
actors with such oddball names?), until she finds a witness to the crime, a
neighbor who saw that the killer got out of a late-model sedan to commit the
crime and then got back in it to escape.

Sarah (one wonders whether writer
Serge deliberately named the character after the 1970’s actress who made headlines
for her scandalous sexual affairs and even did a one-woman show about them, Smiles — originally called S. Miles Is Me — in which she played herself) responds to her
new-found freedom from that terrible husband of hers by reconnecting with her
former publisher Will (who looks at her with doe eyes that make it seem like he
wants to be her next boyfriend) and committing to publish a new book of poetry,
compiled from what’s been on her blog as well as new works. He’s convinced
there’s still a market for Sarah Miles after Lee gets the store where she works
to host a book-signing, and she attracts a surprisingly large audience. Sarah
lets Lee into her home — where she repays Sarah’s kindness by sneaking rat
poison into the drink bottle used by Sarah’s housekeeper Nina (Edie Inksetter),
knocking Nina out for a couple of weeks so Lee can get closer not only to Sarah
but to Megan, who comes to call her “Auntie Lee” and who trusts her even after
mom stops doing so. The perfect-soulmate relationship between Sarah and Lee
starts to cool after Sarah, who’s sought help from Lee on editing some of her
poems for the new book, submits the manuscript and starts dating Will. Lee
tries to get Sarah a contract with a larger publisher, Solomon House (maybe
they could split the book in two and each publish half of it — joke), but Sarah
insists that she’s staying with Will, who in turn wants to make sure she’s now
fully committed to a career as a writer and won’t just jump ship to marry
another rich guy. The movie ends exactly the way you’d expect it to: Sarah,
who’s been arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband and is bailed out but
under house arrest with an ankle bracelet to make sure she doesn’t leave home,
sends Will out on a mission to find out Lee’s real story — while her criminal
defense attorney hires a private investigator, Paul Crawford (Norman Mikael
Berketa), to check out Lee’s background but the first night he’s on duty he
breaks into her home, she catches him, kills him and somehow manages to drag
the dead weight of his body (he’s about twice her size) into the trunk of her
car and dispose of it without leaving a trace.

In the finale, Lee comes to
Sarah’s home — she lets herself in with the spare key she stole from Daniel
after she killed him — and tries to dispose of Will with a single shot to the
head, then tries to make off with Megan (is there a rule in the guidelines for
Lifetime writers that whenever the good and bad characters are both women, the
bad girl must kidnap the good
girl’s kid at the end?), and Sarah gets in her car and follows, knowing the
signal on her GPS ankle bracelet will alert the cops, they will follow, and in
a bit of deductive brilliance worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Detective Collins
somehow figures out Lee, not Sarah, is the real killer and arrests her. A tag
scene shows Will, alive, well and clearly on his way to becoming Sarah’s next
husband and Megan’s stepfather, with Sarah in the Miles home and the natural
order of domesticity restored. The Perfect Soulmate is perhaps a bit too “perfect” in its plotting, its meticulous checking
off of each Lifetime cliché, but what it really suffers from is the absence of
Christine Conradt as writer. Surely she could have come up with a more complex
and dramatically interesting villain — especially given the weird scene about
an hour and a half in during which Sarah decides to come to Lee’s place and
make her dinner, drugging her dessert so she can put Lee under and search her
house for the murder weapon. I was beginning to wonder if John Serge was planning
a reversal in which Sarah would turn out to be involved with her husband’s
murder after all; she had hired Lee to do it with the promise of future payment
from Daniel’s estate and now wanted to eliminate her increasingly inconvenient
co-conspirator. That underscores another problem with The Perfect
Soulmate: the leading characters are all pretty much unlikable. About the only person who
comes off as sympathetic in this story is Jay (Asha Talbert), Lee’s
African-American co-worker at the bookstore, who at first thinks Lee and Sarah
are Lesbian lovers and makes it clear she wants to see Lee get her ashes
hauled, and whether it’s by a man or a woman makes no difference to her!